The New Twitter Analytics: Cheat Sheet

They’re finally here! Analytics straight from Twitter. Although they’re a little hidden, we’ve found them extremely useful when it comes to analyzing your Twitter marketing efforts. Here’s a quick cheat sheet to get you up to speed.

First, log into Twitter.com and from your home page, click on your Settings drop down menu. Then, click on Twitter Ads. Don’t worry, we aren’t actually looking at ads.

From there, Twitter will ask you to sign-in again and then take you to Twitter’s Ad pages, which will display any current advertising that you’re doing with Tweets.

To get to the good stuff, click on the Analytics drop down on the black bar at the top. You should see three options: Timeline Activity, Followers and Websites . The first two are what we want to look at for analytics. Let’s check out Timeline Activity first.

This is the fun part! You can now see your Twitter mentions, follows and unfollows for the past 30 days in the top graph…

And how your recent tweets have been performing in the bottom chart.

Hover over any date in the Mentions, Follows, Unfollows chart to see your mentions, follows and unfollows for that specific day.

Tip: Received a large amount of unfollows in one day? This indicates a conversation topic that did not resonate with your audience, or too many tweets in one day.

The bottom chart is our favorite part. It shows your recent tweets and how many clicks any links in those tweets received, how many favorites, how many retweets, and how many replies.

Twitter will also show you which tweets are performing above average by telling you when your extend your Normal Reach. If you get a number times your Normal Reach, pat yourself on your back: the shares and engagement around a tweet caused it to reach new people. You can select which tweets to view by clicking Best, Good, or All.

“Best” is good for seeing which tweets have performed the highest, so you can analyze which types of tweets are most popular among your followers.

Tactic: Increase impact by repeating the highest analytics at different times of day or on different days of the week.

Let’s switch to the Followers analytics, using the Analytics drop-down menu up top.

Now displaying your Twitter followers chart, you can click on any of the demographic segments on the page to filter results by that segment.

Tactical takeaways:

Which are the top cities your followers are based in? Do some location-based marketing and promote industry events in those cities.

“Your followers also follow” can show you which competitors your audience is interested in, as well as new industry folks worth following.

The Interests and Top interests column can also suggest new hashtags for your tweets so you’re serving your audience’s needs.

What do you think about the new Twitter analytics? Are they helpful? What would you add or change?